Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Kenji Mizoguchi | Zangiku monogatari (The Story of the Last Chyrsanthemum)

a dream of the past

by Douglas Messerli

Matsutarō
Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda (screenplay, based on a novel by Shōfû Muramatsu),
Kenji Mizoguchi (director) Zangiku
monogatari (The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemum) / 1939, USA 1979

In late 19th
century Japan, the adopted son, Kikunosuke Onoe (Shôtarô Hanayagi), of the
Kabuki master, Kikugoro Onoue (Gonjurō Kawarazaki) performs on-stage with his
famous father. Kikunosuke is what some describe as a “ham,” a weak actor whom
the large cast and backstage hands mock behind his back while only presenting
smiles and praise to his face. Even his father, speaking to others of his son’s
inability to act, calls him up from his downstairs dressing room to commend his
acting. In short, no one,, it appears, will speak the truth to the future
inheritor of the great Onoue name. The spoiled boy, accordingly, spends most of
his nights out carousing until well after midnight instead of studying his art.

On this night, however, he meets, just
outside his house, the family nurse, carrying his father’s recently born son.
The child is unable to sleep and the nurse, Otoku (Kakuko Mori) holds it to
calm it down. Politely scolding Kikunosuke for coming home at such a late hour,
she mentions that she has been to the theater with a friend to see his
performance, and when he asks about his acting, she is honest. He must be more
rigid and learn his art, she summarizes.

Struck with her honesty, knowing himself
that he is lacking, a relationship begins to develop between the two. A few
days later, when his family is out of the house, he once again encounters Otoku,
accepting her offer of a watermelon, cutting it up himself and serving it to
her. At that very moment, the family returns, shocked to see him at table with
a servant.

Kikunosuke’s mother immediately fires the
girl, despite Otoku’s protests that she has done nothing wrong. When Kikunosuke
discovers that Otoku is gone, he goes in search for her, finding her days later
and offering to marry her. Angered by his son’s now scandalous behavior,
Kikugoro demands he leave the woman, the son responding by leaving his family
and Tokyo, working for another Kabuki master, Tosiba, in Osaka.

When the master dies, Kikunosuke and his
wife have little money for food and board. When that company disbands, they
have enough only to stay in an inn for a few nights. By coincidence Kikugoro
Onoue and his company are performing in Osaka, and hearing of it, Otoku visits
Kikunosuke’s father, pleading for his return to the family, which they accept
if she will give him up. She agrees, but refuses to tell her husband the truth.

In the years Kikunosuke has been
performing alone, due to Otoku’s love and the suffering he has had to endure,
he has become a great actor who now, in performance with his father once more,
is recognized as a changed man. As the cast join to celebrate in a great river
procession, a friend of the family comes to report that Otoku, staying with her
sister, is near death. Kikugoro gives his son permission to visit his wife, and
Kikunosuke rushes off.

Hearing of her husband’s success and the
father’s change of mind, Otoku tells him to return to the river procession, as
she joyfully accepts his proclamation that he can now “be happy in both his
profession and life.” The film ends with the river procession with Kikunosuke
waving to the appreciative crowds, as we perceive that at the same moment Otoku
has died.

To most American viewers, this story can
only be thought of as a kind of sentimental soap-opera, a tale of a young
artist who, attempting to marry the wrong woman, loses his career only to
rediscover himself, ending in a reunion with his family—the kind a work told
over and over in American musical comedies such as There’s No Business Like Show Business. But Mizoguchi’s film is
something much different: a work of dimension and subtlety that is difficult to
explain.

Part of the problem here, obviously,
exists in the cultural differences. Our lack of understanding of Japanese
societal distinctions, the Kabuki art, and the deification of the artist in
general create gaps in comprehension. For Mizoguchi’s tale is not simply or
even generally about a man who has fallen in love below his societal rank, but
about a culture that in some senses allows no way out for anyone, neither the
family nor the lovers. Mizoguchi’s story, moreover, is not as much narratively
based as it is cinematically oriented. It is his way of showing this story that makes for such a transformative work of
art.

As critic Dave Kehr has commented, from
the very first scenes of the film in the Kabuki theater we are shown the
stratification of the patriarchal order of this world: “the small, neatly
ordered rooms speak of a compartmentalized society, a place for everything and
everything in its place. Graduating from the dank shadows of the offstage area,
where the extras prepare, to the brightly lit and decorated dressing room of
the star. Kikunosuke is literally called from the depths to confront his father
when the performance is over.”

Much of the work, as in Ozu’s films, is
shot in a horizontal space, in which characters are set out in a seemingly
non-hierarchical positions; yet their verbal expressions, many of which in the
tape I saw remained translated and perhaps untranslatable, says it all.The camera, usually placed at a far distance
from the actors, does not judge, but the characters are very much evaluating
and judging each other. These figures, moreover, are nearly all entrapped,
locked away in a series of interlinking rooms, some leading to nowhere or small
cabinets and closets, others to further entrapment. Even more importantly, the
director generally impedes our vision, placing his actors behind bars and
blinds, cutting them off from each other with doorways and windows. Much of the
action—and the language being expressed—occurs just out of camera range. Up and
down, inside and outside, behind and in front, Mizoguchi’s work suggests a
world in which figures are already cut off from one another, positioned in a
landscape that will not allow open communication, certainly not dissent. As
Kikunosuke, late in the film, says to Otaku of his father: “I can’t show him my
face.”

As Kehr points out, only in scenes
between Kikunosuke and Otaku do we sense a kind of equality, an openness that
represents their unexpressed (on camera) passion. In particular, the scene in
which they move laterally in an outside space when they first meet and the
scene in which Kikunosuke cuts watermelon both reveal a world different from
the Onoue home and theater. In both instances, Kikunosuke has accepted an
offering from Otaku and openly shared it: in the first he has accepted her
criticism of his acting, which utterly changes him as a human being; in the
second, he accepts the fruit but, breaking with the tradition in which she
would be expected to cut it up and serve it to him, he does just the opposite,
playing the role of the woman as he will to his father later in the film on
stage. Late in the movie, when Kikunosuke returns home, he observes the same
action of a servant cutting a melon, staged in repetition of the first scene,
which tells us everything we need to know. Here the action is a joyless task,
while earlier it was all about the pleasure of giving, of sharing.

Finally, in several scenes Mizoguchi’s
camera literally tracks its characters down, racing along with the searching
figures, between structures, through neighborhood structures, upstairs and
downstairs. As opposed to the static relationships apparent in the house and
theater, here we comprehend a desperate search for something outside tradition,
an almost frenzied attempt to track down the other, to find what soon might be
or has already been lost. As opposed to the predetermined gestures of Kabuki,
the staid status quo of the Onoue household, or the theatrical bows of the
river possession, with which the movie ends, these clearly represent the living
force that Kikunosuke and Otaku have discovered in one another, something which
the young artist must give up in order to survive in such dead space.

The plot, accordingly, is one thing, but
Mizoguchi’s camera shows us something deeper, more horrifying, even perverse: a
“dream of the past” with no present, no future.